Annotation:Mr. Stirling of Keir's Reel (1)
MR. STIRLING OF KEIR'S REEL [1]. Scottish, Reel (whole time). A Major. Standard tuning (fiddle). AAB. The reel was composed by Magdalene Stirling (1765–1846), the youngest daughter of Sir William Stirling, 4th Baronet of Ardoch, Perthshire, and his wife Christian Erskine. Magdalene's tunes were often published by others prior to her own 1812 Twelve Tunes. She died unmarried.
Her title honors a member of another branch of the Stirling family whose seat was in the parish of Keir and the County of Stirling. The Stirlings supported the Jacobites during the 18th-century rebellions, and the estate was forfeited. However, they continued to live at Keir, and built the house (which survives to the present) in around 1760. Income from the family's estates in Jamaica funded agricultural improvements and landscaping of the grounds, and the family was thus beneficiaries of wealth derived from enslaved peoples.
